ourtimewillcome [any]

the problem is that you are holding yourself to an idealist standard.

as i said in a previous comment, we should reject the leap from “i (marginally) benefit from an unjust system” to “i should hate myself, and people harmed by that system should condemn me as a person.”

guilt isn’t the same as accountability. feeling bad may acknowledge harm, but self-condemnation by itself leads to nothing good and only causes harm to yourself and the movement. a more useful question is: “what do i participate in, what power do i have, and what can i do with others to change it?” that points towards political solidarity and material change, rather than treating self-hatred as proof of moral seriousness.

“i’d condemn myself in their shoes” is projection, not evidence. it assumes people harmed by imperialism would all respond alike, and that your imagined reaction tells you what they actually think. people in the global south are not a single moral tribunal. some may (in my opinion wrongly) view you with dislike; others may be more intelligent and focus criticism on actual governments, companies, institutions, or particular actions. their views deserve to be heard as specific views, not guessed at or generalised.

don’t make harmed people responsible for condemning or absolving you! listen to particular people and movements without expecting moral judgement or expecting one person to speak for everyone. take criticism seriously, but don’t turn it into a verdict that you are irredeemably bad.

you are not guilty by birth or geography! you don’t need to hate yourself to oppose imperialism. you only need to understand your position, listen without expecting to be judged on moral grounds, and act with others against the structures causing harm.

i’m sorry, but i don’t quite get what your question is referring to. could you please elaborate?

marxism is not moralism; it does not demand of us to swear a moral oath and uphold it like some kind of political vestal virgins. when lenin was in switzerland, he still ate, did he not?

yes, on a rational level, we may analyse how our own consumption affects others, and it is indeed correct to try to reduce harm to the best of one’s ability, but ultimately individualist approaches are ineffective compared with systemic ones, and self-flagellation is an individualist approach.

you did not create or choose colonialism, or unequal exchange! any benefit you may receive from its existence does not paper over the fact that you are yourself exploited and have a common class interest with all other workers on this planet, not to mention the fact that the main cause of harm and the main benefactor of those systems is not you, but the capitalist!

also, i would like to push back against the notion that people in the first world have been “given” the benefits from capitalism:

The truth is, that nothing was ever given to you. The founding fathers didn’t give you your rights! Women weren’t given the right to vote! You always hear [that] women were given the right to vote with the 19th Amendment. Women struggled for a hundred years. For a hundred years, from the 1820s when they mobilised the first convention—and by the way, the vote wasn’t even their major demand—they had a whole host of demands related to the treatment of women, labour and child labour, property rights, inheritance rights, and all that sort of thing, including legal rights.

Women struggled for a hundred years; they agitated, marched, got arrested, beaten up, roughed up, and chained themselves to the White House gates. They were thrown into jail; some of them died of pneumonia, were force-fed, and endured all manner of brutal treatment. Only after a hundred years of struggle were they “given” the vote—this great gradualist process.

[…] Workers were not given free trade unions either; they had to fight for them. They had to fight against goon squads, Pinkerton detectives, terrorists, state militia, the National Guard, and the US Army. And that is how they achieved it, with their blood and their struggle.

–michel parenti

even third-worldist analysis does not condemn global-north workers morally! it merely seeks to analyse, explain, and criticise certain political realities and bring to light the additional difficulties and injustices third-world people have to face. but no global-south revolutionary would ever deny you the title of worker or perceive you as an enemy on the same level as they perceive the capitalist.

to love and help others, it is helpful to love and help yourself.

do you believe friedrich engels to have been a parasite? do you believe souphanouvong to have been a parasite?

again, marxism does not preach asceticism or seclusion from a society you did not create! marx himself critiqued such attitudes in “the poverty of philosophy”!

it is not a productive approach to belittle one’s own contributions and self-flagellate over perceived imperfections. whatever negative impact you may have materially on others is utterly microscopic in comparison with the bourgeoisie, which is the enemy of both you and your fellow workers in the global south.

so have some priorities, as well as self-respect.

self-hatred is counter-productive!

please don’t fall into the liberal-moralist trap of believing a socially produced injury to be your personal defect. you did not choose the material conditions you live under! could the average russian worker be blamed for not having achieved as much as lenin?

i understand that in our ideological drive and conviction, we sometimes ask ourselves the impossible, but ironically, this is capitalist indoctrination talking: it is capitalism that pushes us into thinking that only our productive output matters in life, but one should remember that we are all ultimately just human. there is no shame in taking a break for one’s health, and there is no shame in taking part in the society you’re forced to exist in. we are not preaching asceticism!

self-hatred is what the enemy wants us to feel, as it causes demoralisation and helplessness and serves to turn structural pressures into a verdict on one’s own character. instead, direct your anger appropriately: it is not you who caused the world’s problems, but the bourgeoisie.

lastly, i cannot emphasise enough that criticism isn’t the same as self-hatred. you can recognise mistakes and work to change without condemning your whole self.